Three RiversHudson~Mohawk~SchoharieHistory From America's Most Famous Valleys

Early
Eighteenth Century Palatine EmigrationA British
Government Redemptioner Project to Manufacture Naval Storesby Walter Allen Knittle, Ph.D.Department of HistoryCollege of the City of New YorkPublished Philadelphia, 1937

Introduction
to Appendices

The
Palatine Immigration was so involved financially with the British government
that many lists of these immigrants were drawn up. Most of these lists, heretofore
unpublished, were turned up in the course of this research. They constitute
a most valuable addition to genealogical information, since the most difficult
problem confronting the genealogists is that part of the link which establishes
just when the colonial ancestor arrived. Heretofore, the largest list of these
emigrants published contained only 6,000 people. The lists given here double
that total.

For
convenience in referring to the lists, they have been arranged in this order
under these headings.

The Kocherthal Party--1709 Emigration

The
First Board of Trade List of Palatines in London (May 6, 1709)

The
Embarkation Lists from Holland

The
Roman Catholic Palatines Returned to Holland

The
New York Subsistence List

The
Simmendinger Register

The
Pennsylvania Palatine Lists

The
Petition List of Palatines in North America

The
Irish Palatine List

Each
list has been briefly described under its heading and the source of the information
given. All information in the lists has been included, except where otherwise
stated as in Appendix B. No attempt has been made to reconcile the spellings
between any two of the lists as it was felt that each record had best stand
upon its own merits. There is a great deal of variation in the spelling of
the names among the various lists,which may be accounted for by the eighteenth
century habit of spelling a word the way it was pronounced, a habit now lost
but of some merit, and by the difficulties of list-makers writing names in
a language often strange to them. The latter difficulty is not so valid with
the Palatine list-makers, who were in most instances German or Dutch, the
latter not unrelated to German. Perhaps the worst difficulty was the illiteracy
of a number of the Palatines, who may be presumed to have been able to pronounce
but not spell their names. The use of the feminine ending "in" at
the end of the women's family names should not be confusing to the casual
reader of the lists; it simply denotes that the female in question was unhampered
by any present male attachment, she being either an unmarried girl or a widow.